Over the next five days, I consumed a total of 2,000 calories and had lost the five pounds. Thanks to my self-discipline and determination, I was a success. I felt like I could accomplish anything. I was proud of myself, and my mother was proud of me, too. We drove up to Melbourne for the fashion show with confidence and maybe even a little excitement. I was ready. I was twelve years old and about to start my career.
I arrived to pandemonium. Due to our hitting some traffic in the hour-long journey from Geelong and the fact that we were left alone to find our way to the backstage area, I was slightly late for the show.
“The girl that just walked in hasn’t been through makeup and hair,” yelled a man with a clipboard. I was yanked by the forearm from my mother and guided over to an empty stool. From that point on, I was a product on an assembly line. My head was doused with cold water and blown dry, the round brushes tearing at the knots in my hair while I was simultaneously poked in the face with a coarse brush that at certain angles felt like hundreds of fine dressmaking pins. Bright, ugly, unflattering colors were slapped on my face with the brushstrokes a house painter would use to apply primer. I sat in silence looking at my reflection as it became uglier, unable to even introduce myself because of the guilt I felt that my lateness had caused this panic. Nobody had asked me for my name anyway. There were models to the left and right of me in varying stages of completion, none of whom even glanced my way until the makeup artist exclaimed in a shrill voice, “What am I supposed to do with these eyebrows?” And that made the model next to me turn to look at them.
“Whoa. They’re some crazy eyebrows!” the male model said to me in a big, stupid way that made me angry rather than ashamed.
“They’re exactly like my father’s eyebrows and he’s dead.” That shut him up. I started thinking about my dad and wondered how he would feel about me modeling. Although I felt really bad about using him to justify having big, bushy eyebrows, it wouldn’t be the last time I did it to stop people from talking about them. Until I realized you could pluck them. Other than that one interaction with the model, I didn’t actually talk to any of the other Team models until after the show when we were directed by the bookers to mingle with the crowd. As I was awkwardly standing alone at a high-top table trying to look sophisticated by sipping sparkling water, I overheard one of the girls say, “Apparently there’s a girl here who’s only twelve,” and I blurted out in excitement, “That’s me! I’m twelve!” as only a twelve-year-old could. After that, word spread and other models talked to me in the condescending way adults talk to children. I was hardly a child and they were only a few years older than me, so I didn’t appreciate it. But the most upsetting thing about meeting them was that I realized how beautiful all of them were. Stripped of their crazy fashion show makeup I could see their big eyes, set far apart and cradled by their perfect cheekbones that the rest of their face hung from in perfect proportion. Their hair, thrown up messily yet beautifully in a hair tie, and their loose, easy clothes spoke of their attitude toward their beauty—it was effortless and unconscious. It didn’t require their critical eye reflected in a mirror to craft it; it just was there. They were so much more beautiful than me that I was in awe of them. I felt so ashamed of the dress and heels I’d bought for the occasion, and so stupid to have reapplied makeup after removing the show makeup. But the thing that gave me the pit in my stomach was the fact that I knew I needed it. Underneath the caked-on foundation was red blotchy skin, and if I didn’t wear eyeliner, my eyes looked too small for the roundness of my face. I was different from all those girls, and I had to be careful not to let anyone see it.
The show itself was pretty uneventful. I had to model only one unrevealing outfit—culottes and a T-shirt with built-in shoulder pads. I was sent down the runway with a male model who strutted around like he was line dancing, holding me by the wrist and twirling me around like I was a prize he’d won at the state fair. I felt stupid that I’d made such a big deal about the show. After I’d stood around practically in silence for over an hour, overhearing conversations that intimidated me because I couldn’t understand what anyone was talking about, I was finally allowed to go home. I felt relieved that the night was over. I got into my mother’s car, took my heels off, and curled my cold feet underneath me. I sat facing her as she drove, talking to her all the way like she was my best friend. I ate a whole bag of mint candies that my mother had put in the car for me as a reward for getting through my first fashion show and for successfully losing all that weight. I ate them greedily and steadily until there were none left. As we pulled into our driveway an hour later at midnight, exhausted and full of sugar, it crossed my mind that eating all those candies might have caused me to gain a pound. As I walked barefoot to the back door, my belly distended in my skintight dress, I devised a plan to stop the sugar from turning into fat. Tomorrow was sports practice at school, and I made a promise to run ten extra laps around the hockey field to make up for it. And that wasn’t the only promise I made that night that I didn’t keep. I promised myself I wouldn’t binge again.
7
“HEY, PORTIA. How were your days off?” I walked into the wardrobe fitting room passing Jane Krakowski as she was leaving.
“Great, thanks.” I was aware as I spoke that I hadn’t talked in awhile. It felt unnatural and my voice sounded raspy and constricted with phlegm, the telltale sounds of a chain-smoker. I cleared my throat, embarrassed.
“See you in there.” She said it in a way that sounded like we were both in trouble, like we were about to walk into a detention room at school. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw Jane. Her facial expressions were infectious, like she was keeping a naughty secret that could crack her up at any moment. Apart from Jane, I hadn’t really gotten a sense of the cast yet. They all seemed pretty quiet and professional, more like corporate businesspeople than the actors I had known in the past. The cast of my first movie, Sirens, interacted with each other in a much more playful manner than I’d observed with the cast of Ally. During Sirens, we’d eat lunch together and listen to Hugh Grant’s hilarious stories or Sam Neil’s dry explanation of what it was like to be a supporting actor to a dinosaur in Jurassic Park. But maybe I would eat lunch with them today and hear their stories. Maybe I’d even tell them some of Hugh’s stories. They were much funnier than mine.
As I said my hellos to the folks in the fitting rooms, it occurred to me that in a great ironic twist, I could possibly be perceived by the cast as a threat. Any new cast member threatens to take away airtime from the ensemble cast members, their story lines and attention. No television actor really embraces the idea of a new cast member, with perhaps the exception of the overworked titular character. I didn’t feel as though the cast was threatened by me, however. I felt that they were threatened by the change that my presence signified, that it prompted them to ask themselves, “If this could happen, then what’s next?” While everyone was very pleasant to me, I got the sense that they were all just wondering why I was there. They were celebrities on a hit television show, and I’d only had small parts in three movies and two very short-lived sitcoms to my credit. I guess we were all wondering why I was there.